Forever in Blue Read Online Free PDF

to take her eyes from the model.
    When the timer dinged and the model broke her pose, Lena finally looked up. She saw dark brown hair poking above the newly set-up canvas, curly and not very well trained. A tall person, most likely male. She quickly looked down. It was familiar dark brown hair. She tried to think. She kept her eyes down as she went into the hall.
    Lena had developed the habit years before of avoiding eye contact. It was a sad capitulation, in a way, because she loved to look at people’s faces. She wanted to be an artist, after all. She had good, informative eyes, and she liked to use them. The trouble was, whoever she looked at was usually looking back. And though she liked looking, she did not like being looked at. Brain-wise, she was perfectly designed for invisibility. Face-wise, she knew she was not. She’d always been striking. She’d always gotten attention for it.
    That was one of the things she loved about drawing and painting models. It was the only time in her life she got to look and look and look and nobody looked at her.
    She walked back to her easel after the five-minute break, gearing up for the next twenty-five minutes of concentrated work. The late person with the hair was still at work. It made her sort of curious. She saw a hand and a palette. It was a man’s hand.
    For the first minutes of the pose, she thought about the hair and the hand across the way and not about her drawing. That was strange of her. Well, maybe she did avoid eye contact, but she apparently fell for a mystery as hard as the next person.
    At the break, she waited for the face to emerge from behind the canvas. She waited for him to find her face and look at her. Then the world would be normal. He would look at her for a few seconds too long and then she could not care about him anymore.
    Did she know him? She felt like maybe she did.
    Another break passed and he did not so much as peer around his canvas. How frustrating. She actually positioned herself to get a look at him. She had to laugh at herself in the process, craning her neck. The laugh brought in the smell of linseed oil and oil paint and she felt happy in a visceral, smell-induced way.
    Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. Then you didn’t want it anymore. You took what you had for granted until it was no longer yours. This, it seemed to her, was one of the crueler paradoxes of human nature.
    She remembered a pair of brown wedge boots. She’d seen them at Bloomingdale’s and passed them up because they cost over two hundred dollars. They probably had lots of pairs in the back, she’d thought. Certainly they would have her gargantuan size in stock. She could always come back.
    And yet when she did go back two days later, they were all gone. She asked the saleslady, who said, “Oh, those wedge boots sold out instantly. Very popular. No, we’re not getting any more.”
    At which point, Lena became obsessed. It wasn’t that other people wanted them. It was that she couldn’t have them. No, that wasn’t completely it either. Partly, at least, it was the fact that they were genuinely lovely boots. She scoured the Internet. She researched the manufacturer, she searched eBay. She would have bid three hundred dollars for those two-hundred-dollar boots, and yet she never found them. “The boots that got away,” Carmen said jokingly once, when Lena rhapsodized about them.
    So how did desire, hopelessly tricky as it was, relate to love? It wasn’t the same. (She hoped it wasn’t the same.) It wasn’t entirely different. They were certainly related. By blood, though, or more like in-laws? she wondered.
    What about Kostos? There was desire, no question. What else? Would she have continued to love him if he had continued to be available to her? Yes. The answer came before she finished thinking the question. Yes. There was a time when he loved her and she loved him and they both believed they could be together.